6 motives, with a positive prejudice to begin with against all the Gothic' fascinations of the romantic tradition.* But Gaston Paris was not one of these; he had learned from the Romantic school all that it had to teach regarding the Middle Ages and the interpretation of their art; he had gone further on ways of his own, but in his sober judgment of values, even when pointing out the faults, the flatness, the puerilities of medieval literature, he always kept a sense of the old charm, of the magic still recoverable in 'Tristan' and in many less famous stories. The French Romantic school was not so deep in learning as the schools of some other countries; there was no poet who, like Scott or Uhland, worked hard in antiquarian prose to collect and edit and explain the poetry of the Middle Ages. Victor Hugo's romantic ornament is borrowed from all lands and tongues; a tribute levied on mild historians without respect for their feelings : 'Écoutez tous, marquis venus de la montagne, Duc Gerhard, Sire Uther, pendragon de Bretagne, Among the lighter essays of Gaston Paris is one (appended to 'Les sept infants de Lara' in 'Poèmes et légendes') that traces in an amusing way one of the medieval inspirations of Victor Hugo: in M. Demaison's introduction to 'Aimeri de Narbonne' may be found the sources of the poet's 'Aymerillot,' showing the same masterful ease and unconcern in turning the most casual knowledge to good account in immortal verse. By which it is not proved, nor intended, that 'Aymerillot' is less poetical than it seems to be; only that Victor Hugo was not a student of the same sort as Scott or Uhland. The Romantic school in France, so far as it dealt with the Middle Ages, was dependent upon the men of learning, and not to any great extent a sharer in their historical work. Gaston Paris, coming after the Romantic days, carried on the researches that had preceded them. How continuous the labour has been, and how enormous, may be partly realised in looking at the thirty-two volumes of the Histoire littéraire de la France,' begun by the Benedictines in 1733, and now brought down, 'vaster than * Cf. 'La poésie du moyen âge,' i, 213, for the 'conversion' of Victor Le Clerc. empires and more slow,' as far as the fourteenth century. In that great work the ideas of 1830 may be found here and there reflected, but they are only an accident, a passing radiance; the substantial life is hardly touched by them. The study of Old French as it is understood by Gaston Paris and his associates and pupils is the same kind of work as the study of antiquity, Greek or Latin, carried on at the time of the revival of learning. They have the same trust in the value of the subject, the same sort of ambition and appetite for universal knowledge, including in its scope everything ascertainable in political or social history, every document of the time, with the most effective instruments of criticism to explain them. Their business is historical, in the original liberal meaning of the term history. The spirit of curiosity about the past is their chief motive; no appliance or apparatus is neglected that can add to the store of knowledge. In an essay on Gaston Paris written some years ago, M. Jules Lemaître described the processes of medieval research in terms that might have held good of Browning's Grammarian. Historical learning, he says (and the text of his sermon is the work of Gaston Paris), has no thought of any immediate use for its discoveries; labour is bestowed on minute things, in the faith that some day they may be turned to account. The history of the Middle Ages grows like a coral island, by the aggregated lives of many workers. This is not the whole truth. Few indeed of the contributors to the Histoire littéraire' have allowed the pursuit of knowledge to be hindered or diverted by doubts or scruples about the immediate value of each step. It is in this that the modern scholar, the successor of the Benedictines in their industry, differs from the dilettante of the Romantic school. Many things are included in the 'Histoire littéraire' and in 'Romania' that are of no obvious use to the literary artist. It is not on every page that a suggestion like that of 'Aymerillot' may be found; and a discussion of the terminations in -ain has little connexion-much less than 'hot's business' -with the inspiration or the interpretation of poetry. But Gaston Paris thought of more than the accumulation of facts or the working out of historical and philological details. He was a humanist; and his labours were directed by the same ideal as those of the founders of classical learning. He studied the history of Old French literature, not by way of opposition to the humanities of Greece and Rome, but as an extension of the same domain. He had a full sense of all the respects in which 'Roland' comes short of the Iliad,' in which the fluent simplicity of Old French verse is inferior to the Greek art of poetry; yet he believed that the French epics have things to tell worth listening to, and that there is a lesson of style, not only of mythology, in the intricate romances of Arthur.* His genius as a critic of literature equalled his industry as historian and philologist. Of all his achievements, if not the greatest, at any rate that of which it is easiest to speak outside of the school, is that, in a long series of writings, with every variety of scale and immediate purpose, he has explained the growth of Old French poetry and prose in all their kinds, and has judged their present literary value as securely as he worked out technical points of history or scholarship. It is not everything, but it is the aspect of his work most convenient for this Review, that he was one of the great critics of French literature. His preface to the 'History of French Literature,' edited by Petit de Julleville, is a summary of the whole matter, down to the Renaissance and beyond, written with an insight into general causes such as is often desired but seldom attained in the work of other critics. In the certainty with which the lines are drawn it resembles St Evremond's comparison and interpretation of the French and English genius, probably the most successful piece of generalisation ever made by any writer on such subjects; while the general view is enlivened with exact knowledge of details. This essay explains the peculiar character of the French Renaissance, the reason of the wide difference between the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century in France, bringing out the peculiar character of the fifteenth century— 6 une littérature bâtarde, sorte de Renaissance avortée, mêlant les restes de la puérilité subtile du moyen âge à une gauche imitation de l'antiquité latine.' (Preface, p. 9)— * See for example the comparison of the Anglo-Norman Thomas, the chief authority for the story of Tristan, with his more refined contemporary Chrétien de Troyes ('Poèmes et légendes '). a kind of waste interval, empty, pretentious, at the back of which lay the right medieval poetry, unknown to Ronsard and his companions. Then follows the description of this older literature, in terms that prove its affinity with all that is most characteristic of the French nation in modern times, its talent for clear language, a perfect sympathy and understanding between the author and his audience. From this virtue of lucidity comes also (as St Evremond has remarked in comparing French and English) a certain shallowness; the personages in French epic or French drama are not fully realised; more or less they are abstract, they represent ideas. 'On chercherait en vain dans toute l'Europe médiévale une œuvre qui incarne comme la "Chanson de Roland" les façons de sentir, sinon de la nation tout entière, au moins de la partie active et dominante de la nation, dans ce qu'elles eurent de plus impersonnel et de plus élevé. De là cette faiblesse de la caractéristique qu'on a relevée dans notre vieille épopée : les individus l'intéressent moins que les idées et les sentiments dont ils sont les porteurs.' (Ib.) A similar quality is proved to exist in the other kinds of old poetry, in the courtly romances of the twelfth century, in the fabliaux; Lancelot and Renard, the hero and the picaroon, are both of them, in Old French, rather abstract types. Leurs traits sont d'autant plus significatifs qu'ils sont moins personnels, et se gravent d'autant mieux dans le souvenir qu'ils sont coordonnés par une logique parfaite. Ils gagnent en relief et en clarté tout ce qu'ils perdent en profondeur et en complication. N'est-ce pas aussi ce qu'on peut dire des créations les plus parfaites de notre littérature classique?' (Ib.) Then Gaston Paris brings out the peculiar excellence of the romantic poetry of France in the twelfth and thirteenth century, so seldom understood beyond the borders, by the Teutonic nations who imported French novels and adapted them. 'La tendance à créer des types, plutôt qu'à essayer de faire vivre des individus dans toute leur complexité changeante, n'exclut pas l'analyse psychologique; au contraire. Les sentiments humains sont étudiés en eux-mêmes, dans leur évolution logique et leurs conflits, tels que, dans des conditions données, ils doivent se produire, chez tout homme défini d'une certaine façon; et ceux qui les éprouvent aiment à se les expliquer à eux-mêmes... pour l'instruction des autres. Cette analyse psychologique, la littérature française y a excellé dans tous les temps. On pourrait citer tel morceau de Chrétien de Troyes qui ne le cède pas en vérité, en ingéniosité, parfois en subtilité, aux plus célèbres monologues de nos tragédies, aux pages les plus fouillées de nos romans contemporains.' (Ib.) Following which comes a note on the Romance of the Rose,' 'l'épopée psychologique,' as it were the ghost or shadow of all the sentiment in the school of Chrétien de Troyes, disembodied 'states of mind' moving about as persons in a story. The discussion of French medieval style, after this, is equally sure of its ground, and in the same way impartial; setting down all the common faults, platitude, triviality, but not concealing the delight with which the critic turns to the ancient writers, nor ignoring the true beauty of their work. Beau 'Mais leur langue n'est pas seulement claire: elle a souvent une justesse, une légèreté, une aisance naturelle qui font penser aux meilleurs morceaux de notre littérature des deux derniers siècles. Ils voient bien et savent dire avec netteté ce qu'ils ont vu; leur parole les amuse et nous amuse avec eux. coup d'entre eux sont d'aimables causeurs, un peu babillards, qui se laissent d'autant plus volontiers aller à leur verve qu'ils voient que leurs auditeurs y prennent plaisir; d'autres sont d'excellents raisonneurs, qui cherchent sérieusement à convaincre ou à intéresser leur public, et qui y réussissent par la simplicité et la précision de leur exposition; d'autres encore ont su imprimer à leurs discours de la grandeur, de la sensibilité ou de la finesse.' (Ib.) Gaston Paris himself, in his writing, had that instinctive clearness which he finds constant in French literature; that same regard for his hearers which, in the earliest authors of his nation, as he points out, distinguished the even, plain discourse of the chansons de geste from the more high-flown heroic poetry of other nations. At the same time his literary judgment, moving so freely among generalisations, was always based on particulars, a different thing from the peremptory opinions of less patient critics. Popular literary history, working at some distance from its subject, may pronounce that one chanson de geste |